


What it means to miss the War

by Dragunov



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Ficlet, Gen, Zombie AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-10
Updated: 2012-11-10
Packaged: 2017-11-18 08:37:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/559000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dragunov/pseuds/Dragunov
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock is a zombie. Of course Sherlock is a zombie. And probably he let it happen on purpose because John is gone, and for all he knows, dead, and Sherlock was aware of the danger. There was no way he didn’t see the danger. Moriarty is there. Molly is braver and better than most. John is alive, in a way. If Mycroft feels anything, for his country, for his brother, he would go insane, so he wages a war against feeling. And Sebastian will never know what Moriarty's reasons were, but Sebastian is a practical man, and knows how to survive.</p><p>A brief examination of their lives during the zombie war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What it means to miss the War

Sherlock is a zombie. Of course Sherlock is a zombie. He got too curious and he got too close and he got bit. He had to see for himself. No one else’s analysis was enough. And he provided an analysis of it - the entire time he was dying. And Moriarty is there. Mycroft brought Moriarty there because if ever there were a scientific mind that his brother would trust with cold, hard data, it is Moriarty. And for the slow burn of Sherlock’s infection, for those two or three surreal days, he and Moriarty work together, caustic jokes and awkward, painful unasked questions of what Moriarty will do with himself when Sherlock is gone, what there is for him in a world finally as chaotic as he. Sherlock acts resentful of Moriarty’s presence but really is relieved for another human being - his inhumanity is almost ironic now - who is so deeply driven that he’ll brave to be around Sherlock as Sherlock slowly turns into a creature. Molly is there. She’s a nurse now. Molly wants to help - to Jim’s endless smirk - but Sherlock won’t let her in the room. And when Moriarty takes his blood he angles the needle so it hurts _just so._

And Sherlock dies, and Moriarty studies his raving, moaning, growling, empty husk for as long as he can. Mycroft gives the order for Sherlock to be executed, but Molly with a handgun finishes it before the soldiers arrive, to Jim’s endless smirk.

Jim stays at Baskerville. He ascends to the head of the UN’s newly formed Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. 

“Truly, I never thought I would see the day.” Mycroft says, and the phrase is awkward, silly, considering the state of the world. It is a year or so after the war, ten years past the initial outbreak and he is starting to feel so old. There is a streak of undyed grey in Jim’s hair. “James Moriarty, working a legitimate job.”

And Jim, in stark white lab coat, slouched over a petri dish, makes a noncommittal “hm” and they both know that what he does off paper could hardly be called legal.

With time, when the infection is fully eradicated, and peace gives those survivors pause to think, they will come for him. They will come for them.

Because Mycroft saves the world, by murdering thousands, more than thousands, perhaps uncountable millions. Caring is not an advantage, and he has no love, no hate, no emotions at all when he drafts the plan, its numbers strictly rational: to save the smart, the fertile, the useful to society. Pretend to save the others, by leading them away as bait for the hoard. Let the others be eaten alive so the world survives.

He is dimly aware, accepting, with the mind of a politician and historian and existentialist, that future generations will consider him the true monster. He did what he must, he does not care.

John is alive, in a way. He is called back to the army, which is in chaos, its soldiers charged with leaving civilians behind for slaughter, its morale broken, they are fighting an enemy already dead, and it takes too many bullets to make the zombies finally fall still, and ammunition is lower by the day. John follows the army. He is not there when Sherlock dies. And he survives the war - in a way. He no longer sees Mycroft or Molly. He knows there is no home to return to, no Harry or Mrs Hudson. He finds Sebastian by accident. He no longer shakes and limps, though sometimes when he is smoking he freezes still, the look in his eyes far away, until the cigarette burns down to his fingers. Sebastian shakes it from his hand, says it is a waste.

The first few years of the war Sebastian works for Moriarty, delivering files between the surviving labs and military bases, and then the black hawk he’s in crashes, and it’s too strange and too convenient a crash for him to believe, and he knows Moriarty’s hand, because he is Moriarty’s hand, but somehow he survives - was there a reason for that? was there ever a reason? - and finds a small isolated township still struggling. The people are suspicious of him, almost murder him in hysteria, but he sticks around, he teaches them to shoot, shows them how to build fortifications, turns them into warriors, and maybe 100 years later a historian will discover that this town was determined for slaughter in the Holmes Strategy but it lived, and it lived because Sebastian, and he’s not a good man, was never a good man, but he can sleep at night. He turns off the makeshift radio when he hears the first reports of Jim’s trial.

He and John live quietly, with no more war.


End file.
